Succumbing to conspiracism is a surprisingly common response to grief. Being egged on by folk Twitter, who clearly do not know any better, won’t have helped.
Hopefully the autopsy will bring them some kind of closure.
Hopefully the autopsy will bring them some kind of closure.
I've never dealt with such a situation before. But after something bad and unexpected happens, shouldn't it be considered generally a good idea to collect/record a lot of information while it's still possible? After production outages we ensure logs and records and traces are preserved. After bad car crashes you get witness statements, take photos, etc.
Further, nowhere in the article are any family members quoted saying anything conspiratorial. It's people online who are talking about assassination by BigCorp. There are other possibilities besides suicide and being murdered specifically because of the whistleblowing. I think we should take seriously the possibility that an autopsy can be an appropriate and rational choice even without any conspiracy theory being true.
Do they though? I wouldn't say my mom would know anything, or even understand matters at hand. On the contrary, random HN folk could feasibly imagine themselves in my shoes.
For the people who say he had no important information: We do not know that, perhaps he had surprise information.
Currently we're in some sort of weird anti-business mood, so anything that's negative about a perceived mega-corp is taken literally on social media, and amplified up to 11 by karma-farming bots.
However, one cannot use Reddit currently without seeing 42 smiling pictures of a murderer, with thousands of fawning comments.
Many are bots, manipulating people on social media. Unfortunately, too many people are pulled into that bubble and become convinced it represents reality. It doesn't anymore than the flood of Harris posts that suddenly stopped on a dime election night, leaving millions of young people wondering where all the support went (not realizing the support was never there to begin with).
I don't think you're describing any particular political phenomenon though. We saw the same thing happen in 2016 and 2020 overnight - people go from Facebook pundits to sheepish and sore losers in just 12 hours. Bots certainly play a role in all this, but I think you're wrong to blame them as the deus-ex-machina when human behavior explains it all just fine.
Support bases are real for Luigi Mangione and Harris in the same way it's real for MAGA and Elon. People are truly sucked into the cult of personality because it's big, and they don't understand how to contextualize politics outside of celebrity. In a world where people virtue-signal on their favorite politically-aligned platform, it's not hard at all to imagine the majority of this support being entirely genuine.
A lot of people thought the "Stop the Steal" folks were bots, until they showed up and rioted and subsequently hid their identities out of fear that they'd be lambasted for supporting an anti-populist movement. In a post-Jan 6th world I don't quite understand how you can still blame bots for stupid opinions that real people clearly hold.
Most of America (somehow) didn't know what they were voting for and just believed the empty promises.
See the recent regrets of steelworkers and trends of people searching "can I change my vote".
Oh yeah, and all of the people mad that President Musk is gonna increase H1Bs.